What We Talk About When We Talk About America

In the March 2015 speech that launched his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas pledged to “restore that shining city on a hill.”

Cruz has repeated the language in countless campaign appearance since then, no doubt as a way to build a connection in voters’ minds between him and President Ronald Reagan, who made the phrase famous in the 1980s.

Yet while Cruz and countless other politicians from both sides of the political aisle have used the phrase as an inspiring image of the United States’ global leadership over the past half century, it has also fomented some of the worst tendencies of American exceptionalism.

It’s time to retire the phrase back to its home in Scripture, where it belongs.

The first known description of any part of America as a city upon a hill came in 1630 when, while traveling from Great Britain to New England, John Winthrop wrote a discourse titled “A Model of Christian Charity.”

In his charge to fellow Puritans on their way to settle the New World, Winthrop laid out what has since become an iconic vision for the new colonies as “a city upon a hill.” Winthrop borrowed the metaphor from Matthew 5:24, where Jesus tells his followers, “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.”

After nearly three-and-a-half centuries of relative obscurity, the phrase re-emerged in 1961 when President-elect John F. Kennedy called on local, state and federal governments to be “as a city upon on a hill.” Reagan famously invoked the phrase throughout his presidency, and it has since become an iconic part of the way America is talked about both at home and abroad, as a descriptor of American leadership in the world.

Yet, despite the inspiring imagery and bipartisan use of the phrase, describing America as a shining city on a hill fosters a dangerous national identity rooted in a kind of collective vanity which, like personal vanity, often leads to a crippling failure to recognize or admit faults and mistakes.

Vanity leads us to overestimate our own abilities, resources, authority and credibility. On the global scale, national vanity has resulted in an aggressive, interventionist foreign policy that insists that because America is both powerful and righteous, it has to engage in nation-building by promoting global democracy and free markets the world over. This is, to put it mildly, an untenable approach to international relations.

In the context of domestic policy, national vanity also leads to similar delusions, with different consequences. Perhaps the most obvious and gut-wrenching symptom is the $19 trillion — and rapidly growing — national debt.

National vanity has undoubtedly led to the delusion that we are immune from insolvency, that our children will never have to pay the price of reckless spending down the road and that we can continue to spend trillions with no consequences.

Political speech that appeals to our nobler ideals is important. There’s a reason this imagery has been so popular in American politics, and leaders have a responsibility to find the delicate balance between stern, honest speech on the immediate challenges facing our nation and a hopeful vision of the future.

With that in mind, there is a better way to talk about America that aims to foster a truthful recognition of our remarkable achievements without creating delusions of grandeur.

This new approach entails a focus on three key principles: American achievement, constitutional government, and our unprecedented civil, economic, and religious freedoms. Each of these qualities is a genuinely exceptional element of American success in the world, and we would do well to renew national attention on each one of them.

John Dickinson, known as the “penman of the Revolution,” once praised Americans for their lack of lust for empire and their determination to be a modest people. Writing in his“Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania,” Dickinson implored, “May our national character be an animated moderation.”

A return to national modesty would be a return to Dickinson’s animated moderation, as a nation that is alert to current realities, prudent on the world stage, and inventive in her policies and governance.

As we pack our bags and leave the shining city in a hill behind, we should be committed to once again becoming a nation that effortlessly combines energy and prudence in our leadership at home and abroad.

"We, the People" must be equipped to distinguish and between the principles that would keep America free and prosperous and the false premises that will enslave her, as well as able to articulate them. Accommodating tyranny by failing to call it what it is is dangerous. We need a leader whose words are strong and courageous and based in the principles of our Declaration of Independence.

American citizens need to wake up to the counterfeit ideas and false "hopes" offered by politicians who use "promises," just as the rest of us use "currency."

They buy votes with "promises" in order to gain power to themselves and their ilk. Then, when "hopes" are dashed, "the people" they have promised to help (the naive, the poor, the ignorant--even the "educated" who are ignorant of liberty vs. tyranny) find themselves enslaved, working for those who have purchased their power in the most despicable manner--by offering "hope and change." Thus it has ever been.

The people who founded America were not so "dumbed down." Hear two of them:

"It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of citizens and one of the noblest characteristics of the Revolution. The freemen of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise and entangled the question in precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle [usurpation of power] and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle. We revere this lesson too much . . . to forget it." - James Madison

" . . . nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people. When the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American constitution is such, as to grow every day more and more encroaching. Like a cancer, it eats faster and faster every hour. The revenue creates pensioners, and the penshioners urge for more revenue. The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality, become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, lusury, foppery, selfishness, meanness and downright venality swallow up the whole society." - John Adams

Further, it was not just the founding leaders who were well-informed about their constitution and approaching threats to its protections. By the Year 1830, when the French jurist Tocqueville traveled America, he wrote admiringly of the citizenry, observing that even the backwoodsman was far more well-read and informed than those in other parts of the world, and that they understood their Constitution, and had with them a Bible and a newspaper. Sadly, beginning in the mid-20th Century, our "government" schools removed the ideas of liberty from the nation's textbooks, largely under the guise of a counterfeit idea of "separation of church and state," and the citizenry is uninformed as to the difference between tyranny and liberty.

Today, with all modern means of communication, Americans possess little understanding of threats to their liberty and, thus, risk losing it to charlatans whose only goal is power.

Early generations understood that the possession of a written Constitution which, by its own terms, limited the use of power over them was, in the final analysis, their "sheet anchor" against tyranny and oppression.

Here are the concluding remarks of John Quincy Adams's "Jubilee" Address, an address he was invited by the New York Historical Society to give in April, 1839:

"Fellow-citizens, the ark of your covenant is the Declaration of independence. Your Mount Ebal, is the confederacy of separate state sovereignties, and your Mount Gerizim is the Constitution of the United States. In that scene of tremendous and awful solemnity, narrated in the Holy Scriptures, there is not a curse pronounced against the people, upon Mount Ebal, not a blessing promised them upon Mount Gerizim, which your posterity may not suffer or enjoy, from your and their adherence to, or departure from, the principles of the Declaration of Independence, practically interwoven in the Constitution of the United States. Lay up these principles, then, in your hearts, and in your souls – bind them for signs upon your hands, that they may be as frontlets between your eyes – teach them to your children, speaking of them when sitting in your houses, when walking by the way, when lying down and when rising up – write them upon the doorplates of your houses, and upon your gates – cling to them as to the issues of life – adhere to them as to the cords of your eternal salvation. So may your children’s children at the next return of this day of jubilee, after a full century of experience under your national Constitution, celebrate it again in the full enjoyment of all the blessings recognized by you in the commemoration of this day, and of all the blessings promised to the children of Israel upon Mount Gerizim, as the reward of obedience to the law of God."

And,
“—possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the hundredth and thousandth generation, entertaining a due sense of our equal rights to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our industry, to honor and confidence from our fellow citizens. . . enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which. . . proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter – with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and prosperous people?” – Jefferson - 1801

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